


Telosychronous

by cosmickaiju



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Body Horror(?), Character Study, Drabble Collection, Existential Angst, just general experimental pretentiousness all around, unreality
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-03-02 08:30:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18807493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmickaiju/pseuds/cosmickaiju
Summary: Short snapshots on the subject of causality.





	1. Contradictions

They’re a being of contradictions— there’s an intrinsic litheness in being The Serpent, a graceful fluidity, rippling their way through existence. By all appearances slithering masterfully through their six thousand years of existence. Except, well, if anything, they’re a congregation of metallic shards bundled together in some serpentine semblance, sharp edges pressing against them, crashing and blundering their way through. The sharp shock of death echoing off them, shards reverberating against each other, a neurotic current of scales, with too many questions, too much heart for a demon, and not enough answers _why_.


	2. Repetition

Continuity. Iridescent scales, morph, shift, shrink, a smooth streak tracing down between shoulder blades, reptilian melded neatly in amongst flesh. Gold-bright eyes flashing in the dark, bursting like supernovas. Gold again, hidden amongst edges and between shadows. Unneeded breath exhaled between too sharp teeth. A dove taking flight, soaring, carving arcs through the air, razor-sharp through aforesaid scales. Darkness. A swift blow. Not-quite darkness; pinpricks of light, flickering golden. An ebb and flow, cyclical, the same, yet unstagnated. A möbian reality, repeating. Unending. Undying.


	3. Vitality

Breath. A paradoxical defiance. Oxygen filling lungs they’ve never needed, never will need. Filtering through the systems and canals of a corporation, infused with conceptual energies from planes upon which all angels, fallen or not, exist. Manipulation, yet more than that— existence. Energies they shouldn’t handle, ones that rebel against their very continuation of demonhood. Against something deeper too, something cold and final and all consuming, clashing against warmth, growth, essence. This amalgamation gouging into their being, sharp, insistent, unignorable. But there’s something, not good, just _right_ about it. Equilibrium. They breathe life into a dove, and watch it drift away.


	4. Bifurcation

They watch, somehow, though it’s impossible, as something unfurls from them, translucent layers peeling off them, until it’s nebulous and obscured, its sinuous stygian form staring back at them. Staring through them, eyeless, a vacuum of nothingness amidst a background of verdant green. It slithers through them then, serpentine form briefly melding once more with their own, and they feel almost… complete. Something they’d not noticed they’d been lacking since it had left only moments before lingers in that brief eternity, before it shifts, morphs again, something sharp and angular and humanoid, broad wings cutting arcs through reality, before it disappears between the trees. They’d blink, if they had eyelids.   
  
It’s only years later, long after the Fall of Man, that they find the being again (although it had never really left, was merely unneeded at the moment), this cimmerian entity that emulates their angles and prods at their essence in a way that makes the stomach they don’t even need turn. Something in them recoils at this impression of them, at the possibility that this being in front of them is the sum of their parts. Just because they weren’t necessarily _good_ couldn’t mean they could only bring about this indiscriminate demise. So they rebel, they breath life, and it pierces and it burns something fierce, a voluntary immolation. Two parts of a whole, a circuitous, continuous complexity. And the cycle begins anew.


	5. Awareness

Inhale. Exhale. Smoke curls up from the corners of their mouth, the tepid vapors drifting away in the chilled dusk air. They flick at the tip of the cigarette with one sharp finger, a few stray glowing embers falling onto the back of their hand. It doesn’t feel like a thing. A sigh, as they crush the remnants between two fingers without even snubbing it out, unseen eyes tracking the fragments coming easily apart to nothing from behind dark lenses.   
  
If only things could be that easy; if they could cease the strain of existence with just a bit of pressure, if their atoms could crumble apart into nothingness without an effort on their part. Of course there is a way out, a terrible, all consuming immolation; one that sends an icy shard of fear up their spine. Awareness, as draining as it is, isn’t something they’re quite ready to part with still, they suppose. Maybe a nap will do.


End file.
